The Buccaneers (33 page)

Annabel received this in silence. Lady Dick's tirade filled her with a momentary scorn, followed by a prolonged searching of the heart. Her values, of course, were not Conchita's values; that she had always known. London society, of which she knew so little, had never had any attraction for her save as a splendid spectacle; and the part she was expected to play in that spectacle was a burden and not a delight. It was not the atmosphere of London but of England which had gradually filled her veins and penetrated to her heart. She thought of the thinness of the mental and moral air in her own home: the noisy quarrels about nothing, the paltry preoccupations, her mother's feverish interest in the fashions and follies of a society which had always ignored her. At least life in England had a background, layers and layers of rich deep background, of history, poetry, old traditional observances, beautiful houses, beautiful landscapes, beautiful ancient buildings, palaces, churches, cathedrals. Would it not be possible, in some mysterious way, to create for oneself a life out of all this richness, a life which should somehow make up for the poverty of one's personal lot? If only she could have talked of it with a friend... Laura Testvalley, for instance, of whom her need was so much greater now than it had ever been in the school-room. Could she not perhaps persuade Ushant to let her old governess come back to her—?

Her thoughts had wandered so far from Lady Dick and her troubles that she was almost startled to hear her friend speak.

“Well, my dear, which do you think worse—having a lover, or owing a few hundred pounds? Between the two, I've shocked you hopelessly, haven't I? As much as even your mother-in-law could wish. The Dowager doesn't like me, you know. I'm afraid I'll never be asked to Longlands again.” Lady Dick stood up with a laugh, pushing her curls back into their loosened coil. Her face looked pale and heavy.

“You haven't shocked me—only made me dreadfully sorry, because I don't know what I can do....”

“Oh, well; don't lie awake over it, my dear,” Lady Dick retorted with a touch of bitterness. “But isn't that the dressing-bell? I must hurry off and be laced into my dinner-gown. They don't like unpunctuality here, do they? And tea-gowns wouldn't be tolerated at dinner.”

“Conchie—wait!” Annabel was trembling with the sense of having failed her friend and been unable to make her understand why. “Don't think I don't care—Oh, please, don't think that! The way we live makes it look as if there wasn't a whim I couldn't gratify; but Ushant doesn't give me much money, and I don't know how to ask for it.”

Conchita turned back and gave her a long look. “The skin-flint! No, I suppose he wouldn't; and I suppose you haven't yet learned to manage him.”

Annabel blushed more deeply. “I'm not clever at managing, I'm afraid. You must give me time to look about, to find out—” It had suddenly occurred to her, she hardly knew why, that Guy Thwarte was the one person she could take into her confidence in such a matter. Perhaps he would be able to tell her how to raise the money for her friend. She would pluck up her courage, and ask him the next day.

“Conchie, dear, by tomorrow evening I promise you ...” she began; and found herself instantly gathered to her friend's bosom.

“Two hundred pounds would save my life, you darling—and five hundred make me a free woman....”

Conchita loosened her embrace. The velvet glow suffused her face again, and she turned joyfully toward the door. But on the threshold she paused, and coming back laid her hands on Annabel's shoulders.

“Nan,” she said, almost solemnly, “don't judge me, will you, till you find out for yourself what it's like.”

“What what is like? What do you mean, Conchita?”

“Happiness, darling,” Lady Dick whispered. She pressed a quick kiss on her friend's cheek; then, as the dressing-bell crashed out its final call, she picked up her rosy draperies and fled down the corridor.

XXVI.

The next morning Annabel, after a restless night, stood at her window watching the dark return of day. Dawn was trying to force a way through leaden mist: every detail, every connecting link, was muffled in fields of rain-cloud. That was England, she thought; not only the English scene but the English life was perptually muffled. The links between these people and their actions were mostly hidden from Annabel; their looks, their customs, their language had implications beyond her understanding.

Sometimes fleeting lights, remote and tender, shot through the fog; then the blanket of incomprehension closed in again. It was like that day in the ruins of Tintagel, the day when she and Ushant had met.... As she looked back on it, the scene of their meeting seemed symbolical: in a ruin and a fog.... Lovers ought to meet under limpid skies and branches dripping with sunlight, like the nymphs and heroes of Correggio. The “Earthly Paradise,” Guy Thwarte had said.... The Garden of Eden, with which no other garden could compare—

 
Pain had no place in the garden where Correggio's lovers lived “in unreproved pleasures free....” The thought that she had even imagined Ushant as a iover—imagined him, any more than his mother,
approving
of pleasure—made Annabel smile, and she turned away from the window.... Those were dreams, and the reality was: what? First that she must manage to get five hundred pounds for Conchita; and, after that, must think about her own future. She was glad she had something active and helpful to do before reverting once more to that dreary problem.

Through her restless night she had gone over and over every possible plan for getting the five hundred pounds. The idea of consulting Guy Thwarte had faded before the first hint of daylight. Of course he would offer to lend her the sum; and how could she borrow from a friend money she saw no possibility of repaying? And yet to whom else could she apply? The Dowager? Her mind brushed past the absurd idea ... and past that of her sisters-in-law. How bewildered, how scandalized the poor things would be! Annabel herself, she knew, was bewilderment enough to them: a wife who bore no children, a duchess who did not yet clearly understand the duties of a groom-of-the-chambers, or know what the Chiltern Hundreds were! To all his people it was as if Ushant had married a savage....

There was her own family, of course; her sister, her friends the Elmsworths. Annabel knew that in the dizzy up-and-down of Wall Street, which ladies were not expected to understand, Mr. Elmsworth was now “on top,” as they called it. The cornering of a heavy block of railway shares, though apparently necessary to the development of another line, had temporarily hampered her father and Mr. Closson, and Annabel was aware that Virginia had already addressed several unavailing appeals to Colonel St. George. Certainly, if he had cut down the girls' allowances it was because the poor Colonel could not help himself; and it seemed only fair that his first aid, whenever it came, should go to Virginia, whose husband's income had to be extracted from the heavily burdened Brightlingsea estate, rather than to the wife of one of England's wealthiest dukes.

One of England's wealthiest dukes! That was what Ushant was; and it was naturally to him that his wife should turn in any financial difficulty. But Annabel had never done so since the Linfry incident, and though she knew the sum she wanted was nothing to a man with Ushant's income, she was as frightened as though she had been going to beg for the half of his fortune.

Of “the girls,” Lizzy and Mabel Elmsworth had married men who were rich though devoid of title. But Virginia and poor Conchita had long since become trained borrowers and beggars. Money—or rather the want of it—loomed before them at every turn, and they had mastered most of the arts of extracting it from reluctant husbands or parents. This London life necessitated so many expenditures unknown to the humdrum existence of Madison Avenue and the Grand Union Hotel: Court functions, Royal Ascot, the Cowes yachting season, the entertaining of royalties, the heavy cost of pheasant-shooting, deer-stalking, and hunting, above all (it was whispered) the high play and extravagant luxury prevailing in the inner set to which the lovely newcomers had been so warmly welcomed. You couldn't, Virginia had over and over again explained to Annabel, expect to keep your place in that jealously guarded set if you didn't dress up, live up, play up to its princely standards.

Virginia had spoken of a privilege which she, loveliest of the newcomers, had not yet enjoyed. Two pregnancies had prevented her from going into society; next, the Prince of Wales had gone to India for many months; lastly, her father-in-law's uncle Lord John Brightlingsea had died. Lord John, known as the only man in England more absent-minded than his nephew, had still enjoyed excellent health on the day when he forgot to breathe. Family mourning had drastically curtailed activity at Allfriars; and in town, though Conchita nonchalantly abbreviated the observance of secluded grief, Virginia had behaved with meticulous, if peevish, decorum. In December, she had at last been able to accept an invitation to Marlborough House. But when Nan asked about the event during the Christmas house-party at Longlands, Jinny had said bitingly, “The
Princess
of Wales received us. He was elsewhere.” Nan's puzzled “What difference does that make?” had incurred the scathing look her sister had so often bestowed on her in their childhood. “You—little—goose!” Virginia had said, between her teeth.

Annabel wanted nothing of what her sister and her sister's friends were fighting for; their needs did not stir her imagination; she was inattentive to their hints, and they soon learned that, beyond occasionally letting them charge a dress, or a few yards of lace, to her account, she could give them little aid.

It was Conchita's appeal which first roused her sympathy. “You don't know what it is,” Lady Dick had said, “to be in love with one man and tied to another”: and instantly the barriers of Nan's indifference had broken down. It was wrong—it was no doubt dreadfully wrong—but it was human, it was understandable, it made her frozen heart thaw in soft participation. “It must be less wicked to love the wrong person than not to love anybody at all,” she thought, considering her own desolate plight....

But such thoughts were pure self-indulgence; her immediate business was the finding of the five hundred pounds to lift Conchita's weight of debt.

When there was a big shooting-party at Longlands, every hour of the Duke's day was disposed of in advance, and Nan regarded this as a compensation for the boredom of the occasion. She was resolved never again to expose herself to the risks of those solitary months at Tintagel, with an Ushant at leisure to dissect his grievances as he did his clocks. After much reflection, she scribbled a note to him: “Please let me know after breakfast when I can see you”—and to her surprise, when the party rose from the sumptuous repast which always fortified the guns at Longlands, the Duke followed her into the east drawing-room, where the ladies were accustomed to assemble in the mornings with their needle-work and correspondence.

“If you'll come to my study for a moment, Annabel.”

“Now—?” she stammered, not expecting so prompt a response.

The Duke consulted his watch. “I have a quarter of an hour before we start.” She hesitated, and then, reflecting that she might have a better chance of success if there were no time to prolong the discussion, rose and followed him.

The Duke's study at Longlands had been created by a predecessor imbued with loftier ideas of his station, and the glories befitting it, than the present Duke could muster. In size, and splendour of ornament, it seemed singularly out of scale with the nervous little man pacing its stately floor; but it had always been “the Duke's study,” and must therefore go on being so till the end of time.

Ushant had seated himself behind his monumental desk, as if to borrow from it the authority he did not always know how to assert unaided. His wife stood before him without speaking. He lifted his head, and forced one of the difficult smiles he had inherited from his mother. “Yes—?”

“Oh, Ushant—I don't know how to begin; and this room always frightens me. It looks as if people came here only when you sent for them to be sentenced.”

The Duke met this with a look of genuine bewilderment. Could it be, the look implied, that his wife imagined there was some link between the peerage and the magistracy? “Well, my dear—?”

“Oh, you wouldn't understand.... But what I've actually come for is to ask you to let me have five hundred pounds.”

There, it was out—about as lightly as if she had hurled a rock at him through one of the tall windows! He frowned and looked down, picking up an emblazoned paper-cutter to examine it.

“Five hundred pounds?” he repeated slowly.

“Yes.”

“Do I understand that you are asking me for that sum?”

“Yes.”

There was another heavy silence, during which she strained her eyes to detect any change in his guarded face. There was none.

“Five hundred pounds?”

“Oh, please, Ushant—yes!”

“Now—at once?”

“At once,” she faltered, feeling that each syllable of his slow interrogatory was draining away a drop of her courage.

The Duke again attempted a smile. “It's a large sum—a very large sum. Has your dress-maker led you on rather farther than your means would justify?”

Nan reddened. Her dress-maker! She wondered if Ushant had ever noticed her clothes? But might he not be offering her the very pretext she needed? She hated having to use one, but since she could think of no other way of getting what she wanted, she resolved to surmount her scruples.